On that cold, but bright, April day we were guests of your government in the reviewing stand of Red Square to witness the poeple's celebration for Yuri Gagarin and later on that day we attended the somewhat more exclusive reception for him in one of the impressive palaces of the Kremlin.

Gagarin telegraphed " Everything is OK " despite continuing gyrations ; he later reported that he did not want to " make noise " as he had ( correctly ) reasoned that the gyrations did not endanger the mission ( and were apparently caused by the spherical shape of the reentry module ).

At 07: 55 UT, when Vostok 1 was still 7 km from the ground, the hatch of the spacecraft was released, and two seconds later Gagarin was ejected.

Gagarin's parachute opened almost right away, and about ten minutes later, at 08: 05 UT, Gagarin landed.

The Soviet press later reported that minutes before boarding the spacecraft Gagarin made a speech: " Dear friends, you who are close to me, and you whom I do not know, fellow Russians, and people of all countries and all continents: in a few minutes a powerful space vehicle will carry me into the distant realm of space.

Gagarin later became deputy training director of the Cosmonaut Training Centre outside Moscow, which was later named after him.

Sergei Korolev, one of the masterminds behind the early years of the Soviet space program, later said that Gagarin possessed a smile " that lit up the Cold War ".

He was later invited to visit the Soviet Union, where he met Yuri Gagarin, the first man to journey into outer space.

The FAI initially did not recognize the achievement because he did not land in his Vostok spacecraft ( he ejected from it ), but later it recognized that Gagarin was the first human to fly into space.

The Russian Air Force academy has been named in his honor: Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy () later reorganized into Zhukovsky – Gagarin Air Force Academy ()

He began training on 31 May for a planned launch on the spacecraft Vostok 1 ( aboard which Yuri Gagarin carried out the first human spaceflight a year later ).

Less than three weeks later, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin would, on April 12, would reach the milestone.

In his post-flight report, Gagarin recalled his experience of spaceflight, having been the first human in space:

When Gagarin and Titov were informed of the decision during a meeting on April 9, Gagarin was very happy, and Titov was disappointed.

When the 20 candidates were asked to anonymously vote for which other candidate they would like to see as the first to fly, all but three chose Gagarin.

When Komarov's flight ended in a fatal crash, Gagarin was permanently banned from training for and participating in further spaceflights.

When interviewed on May 17 by the newspaper Komosmolskaya Pravda, Yuri Gagarin alluded to the failure of the administration to listen to the concerns about the Soyuz module that were identified by the cosmonaut corps and that Komarov's death should teach the establishment to be more rigorous in its testing and evaluation of " all the mechanisms of the spaceship, even more attentive to all stages of checking and testing, even more vigilant in our encounter with the unknown.

The ground station at Khabarovsk reports back, " There are no instructions from No. 20 ( Sergey Korolyov ), and the flight is proceeding normally " They are telling Gagarin that they don't have his orbital parameters yet because the spacecraft has been in orbit for only 6 minutes, but the spacecraft systems are performing well.

Meanwhile Komarov and his fellow cosmonauts had their groups and assignments constantly revised and they became increasingly anxious about the lack of response to their concerns about the design and manufacture of space craft which had been raised in a letter to Leonid Brezhnev by Yuri Gagarin on their behalf.

The three-member Expedition 1 crew successfully launched on 31 October 2000, at 07: 52 UTC, atop a Soyuz-U rocket on Soyuz TM-31 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan ; they used launch pad Gagarin's Start, from which the first human to fly in space, Yuri Gagarin, was launched in 1961.

Eventually, they find, from the Lantrees records of their last port-of-call, the Darwin Genetic Research Station on Gagarin IV.

That same year, after Yuri Gagarin returned from his space mission, Pelše proposed changing the name of the Latvian capital Rīga but even the Soviet central authorities saw this as too extreme an action.

After Gagarin became the Greatest Man in the World, for a nation that does not believe in the cult of personality or in careerism, Moreland wrote me a letter in which he said: `` I am not interested in how long a bee can live in a vacuum, or how far it can fly.

* 06: 25 UT As Vostok 1 begins its diagonal crossing of the Pacific Ocean from Kamchatka peninsula to the southern tip of South America, Gagarin asks, " What can you tell me about the flight?

Gagarin stated, " If all these people have turned out to welcome me and can stand in the rain, so can I.

* 1961 – The Russian ( Soviet ) cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to travel into outer space and perform the first manned orbital flight, in Vostok 3KA-2 ( Vostok 1 ).

On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space, reinforcing American fears about being left behind in a technological competition with the Soviet Union.

It succeeded in the first but not the second: in the first Mercury mission on 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space ; however the Soviet Union had put Yuri Gagarin into space one month earlier.

In the first Mercury mission on 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space and the second person following Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union who flew one month earlier.

In reality, Gagarin landed separately by parachute while the space craft crashed to the ground, but the Soviet Union did not admit this until 1971.

First human to travel into space, Yuri Gagarin

The Soviet space program achieved many of the first milestones, including the first living being in orbit in 1957, the first human spaceflight ( Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1 ) in 1961, the first spacewalk ( by Aleksei Leonov ) in 1965, the first automatic landing on another celestial body in 1966, and the launch of the first space station ( Salyut 1 ) in 1971.

The flight took Yuri Gagarin, a cosmonaut from the Soviet Union, into space.

In front of this is a 3 meter tall, white stone statue of Yuri Gagarin, wearing a spacesuit, with one arm raised in greeting and the other holding a space helmet.

In his youth, Gagarin became interested in space and planets.

In 1960, after much searching and a selection process, Yuri Gagarin was chosen with 19 other pilots for the Soviet space program.

Out of the twenty selected, the eventual choices for the first launch were Gagarin and Gherman Titov due to their performance during training sessions as well as their physical characteristics — space was limited in the small Vostok cockpit, and both men were rather short.

On 12 April 1961, aboard the Vostok 3KA-3 ( Vostok 1 ), Gagarin became both the first human to travel into space, and the first to orbit the earth.

In a 2006 interview, Gagarin's friend Colonel Valentin Petrov stated that the cosmonaut never said such words, and that the quote originated from Nikita Khrushchev's speech at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU about the state's anti-religion campaign, saying " Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any god there.

" Petrov also said that Gagarin had been baptised into the Orthodox Church as a child, and a 2011 Foma magazine article quoted the rector of the Orthodox church in Star City saying, " Gagarin baptized his elder daughter Elena shortly before his space flight ; and his family used to celebrate Christmas and Easter and keep icons in the house.

Gagarin was also honored by the American space program during Apollo 11 when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left a memorial satchel containing medals commemorating Gagarin and fellow cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov on the surface of the Moon.